Gen

Mountain 5 of the twenty-four mountains (luopan) is Gen, one of only four trigrams placed on the ring, occupying position NE2, due northeast, 37.5 to 52.5 degrees. Gen is Keeping Still, the mountain, the Youngest Son in the family of trigrams set out in the Shuogua, the Discussion of the Trigrams, and it belongs to the phase Earth; its associated animal is the dog and its body part the hand. Doubled upon itself Gen forms hexagram 52, Keeping Still, whose reading counsels not letting the thoughts go beyond the immediate situation, quieting the mind so it grows calm.

Of the eight trigrams of the Bagua, only the four occupying the diagonal, ordinal directions, Qian, Kun, Gen and Xun, appear as named mountains on the twenty-four position ring; the four cardinal trigrams, Kan, Li, Zhen and Dui, are not separately inscribed because their own Later Heaven positions, north, south, east and west, coincide with the ring's four pure cardinal branches instead. In the Earlier Heaven (Fuxi) sequence, a second traditional arrangement of the same eight trigrams recorded separately in this atlas, Gen occupies the northwest, opposite its Later Heaven position of the northeast, a reminder that the twenty-four mountain ring follows only the Later Heaven scheme and not the Fuxi one.

Gen sits directly opposite mountain 17, Kun, twelve positions and a hundred and eighty degrees around the ring, itself one of the other three corner trigrams: the four ordinal trigram mountains pair off against each other in this way, Qian against Kun and Gen against Xun, the same Creative-Receptive and Mountain-Wind pairings the Yijing itself treats as complementary opposites. In compass school feng shui a sitting-facing pair built on a trigram mountain is read through the same basic method Stephen Skinner describes for the ring generally, back toward the sitting mountain and front toward its facing opposite, but a trigram mountain additionally carries its own hexagram, family member and Bagua attribute into readings that draw on the Yijing directly, a layer of meaning the branch and stem mountains, named for a zodiac animal or an elemental Day Master rather than for one of the eight trigrams, do not carry in the same way.

The four trigram mountains mark the diagonal points precisely because the ring's twelve branches already claim the twelve thirty-degree sector centres and its eight stems already claim the flanking positions around eight of those sectors, leaving the four ordinal gaps for the trigrams that complete the twenty-four. Compass school practice treats the fifteen-degree seam between one mountain and its neighbour as a real hazard, not a rounding error: a sitting or facing line falling exactly on that boundary, called an empty or straddling line, is read as drawing on the qi of both adjacent mountains at once rather than cleanly on one, and Stephen Skinner's account of the luopan treats avoiding a seam-line reading as one of the instrument's basic disciplines.